Mazes: Key to Brain Development?

July 30, 2014 - Navigating through mazes to get from point A to point B is part of daily life, and the hippocampus seems to be responsible for helping us handle this invaluable task. Literal mazes created for museums challenge our navigational skills and help us learn to grapple with the unexpected.

Mazes: Key to Brain Development?

July 30, 2014 - Navigating through mazes to get from point A to point B is part of daily life, and the hippocampus seems to be responsible for helping us handle this invaluable task. Literal mazes created for museums challenge our navigational skills and help us learn to grapple with the unexpected.

BJARKE INGELS, ARCHITECT, BJARKE INGELS GROUP:The maze is traditionally a two-dimensional experience. The atrium at the National Building Museum has a scale of an urban square with a colonnade around it. And we thought that we really wanted to explore the third dimension. The senses are bombarded with more experiences than in a traditional maze.

When you enter and when you are close to the periphery, you’re walking in this very narrow canyon. The closer you get to the center, the lower the walls around you become.

Mazes are quite habitually explored in landscape architecture, so in gardens and hedge mazes, but very rarely in building architecture.

JIM OLDS, DIRECTOR-KRASNOW INSTITUTE, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY:Mazes exist to challenge our navigational skills. For us mammals, the hippocampus seems to play a critical role in a kind of learning that has to do with a human’s or animal’s cognitive map of its environment. And we build that cognitive map to allow us to navigate through our surrounding.

The hippocampus actually, I think, operates sort in two modes. In one mode, it’s learning a maze. We can call that acquisition. So it’s keeping track of the new spatial landmarks, what they possibly mean, what’s the wrong way down the path, what’s possibly the right way. And then there’s another mode of the hippocampus which you think of as the read-out phase. So the hippocampus is automatically reading out the correct solution to the maze.

So even a maze that’s on a piece of paper, if it is done well, can be challenging because its sheer complexity forces us to actually keep track of many calculations at the same time as we seek to navigate the maze.

So we’re pretty plastic in terms of our behavior and I think that’s probably because we’re pretty complex organisms. But a rodent actually has simple responses. And one of the most basics on a Y-maze was that if it has gone down one arm then next time it is going to go down the other arm. Then it will alternate back-and-forth. If the hippocampus is disrupted, that alternation is disrupted.

JIM OLDS, DIRECTOR-KRASNOW INSTITUTE, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY:An animal that is not allowed to explore its environment in a proper way is not going to have a brain that is wired up correctly. We think the hippocampus is cranking open and allowing a child to navigate and explore its environment because that is crucial to the rest of the re-wiring of the brain as it goes through development.

BJARKE INGELS, ARCHITECT, BJARKE INGELS GROUP:Obviously the maze is not that difficult when you’re drawing it in plan with a pen. I mean, we could see that on the models that we built that it was going to look amazing. It was going to have, like, these weird warped geometries around you. But we really couldn’t figure out if it was going to be too confusing or not confusing enough. So when I walked through it the first time, I was really happily reassured or relieved that we actually did get lost quite a few times.

Mazes: Key to Brain Development?

July 30, 2014 - Navigating through mazes to get from point A to point B is part of daily life, and the hippocampus seems to be responsible for helping us handle this invaluable task. Literal mazes created for museums challenge our navigational skills and help us learn to grapple with the unexpected.